“See, it’s not so cold,” Joanie said. “How do we start?”
Pete sighed. “Let’s get Lucy at least.” Not Sandy?
But of course Sandy came, too. I felt better once we rang the DeLunas’ bell and got Sandy and Lucy to come out. They were surprised to see us all at their door on a dark November night. They’d been hanging around in their patched jeans and bedroom slippers, watching the Million Dollar Movie, but when they saw us, they grabbed their shoes and came on out, eyes glowing.
“Your birthday!” said Lucy, and gave me a big smooch on the cheek. “I thought you were getting your hair cut.”
Mom had said no. But now I said, “I am, first chance I get.”
All of a sudden I wasn’t even afraid of what Mom might say. It was what I wanted.
“Good,” said Lucy.
“What’s good?” asked Aimée.
“Nothing,” said Lucy and I. Even Joanie kept her mouth shut. And Aimée went to the Rankins’ and got Pammy to come out.
Indeed, it was a perfect hide-and-seek night. Dave was It first. Joanie and I went and hid in Elfland. Our elf furniture was safe at home, but the permanent stuff was familiar in the dark under our fingers: her slide, my elevators, the sink and the pump, the curtain that opened and closed with a rope, a tiny bell hung near a doorway, the stone paths, and the hallways. There were no elves, but we sat together and walked our fingers in and out of the rooms as though they were the elves. “Are you going to ask me to Mame?” asked Joanie. That had been my present from Grandma in Delaware: tickets for me and a friend to my first Broadway show. I had opened the envelope at dinner.
In a way I wanted to. I wished I could go twice. But I said, “My mother’s making me take Dave.” Joanie made a face but shrugged. She could see how it was.
On the next round I hid with Dave, and I asked him about Mame. “If I’m here,” he answered.
“You’re not really leaving.”
Aimée was It. She was going in the opposite direction from us, so I relaxed and leaned against the wall of the DeLunas’ house, Dave’s shoulder touching mine. He smelled like pine trees and chocolate cake.
“Yeah, we probably are,” he said.
“You and your dad?” I tried to see his eyes. I thought he was crying.
“Why do you think Mom wanted to talk to them alone?” he said.
“Leaving?”
“They’re telling your parents.”
I knew what it meant when people said their hearts sank. Mine had stones on it as heavy as the ones on the newspapers in the Little River. I remembered Dave’s arm around me when he’d told me about Wendy Boland. I slipped my hand under his arm and held his hand, and he let me.
“You’re going to Ohio?” I said.
“No.”
“Where, then?”
“She wants to be in Massachusetts at Grandpa’s for Christmas.”
“Who, your Mom?”
“She doesn’t have any money.”
“I’ll give you the paper route.” It figured I’d have to give it up now that the news was improving: NIXON PUSHES FOR HALT TO NORTH VIETNAM BOMBING.
I didn’t know what I was saying. How could Dave do the route from Massachusetts? And I didn’t know what Dave was saying, or I’d have asked why he was talking about only Aunt Bonnie. What had happened to Ohio?
He sat up and took his hand away. “It’s all decided. She’s asking them now.” He started kicking at the bushes with one foot.
“Asking them what?”
“I’m not supposed to say.” He shoved his foot into the roots and shook the bush violently.
I grabbed his jacket. “Say? To me?”
He gave in. “She wants to sell them the house.”
“Your house?” Aimée was going to hear me. Already she was turning our way. “Us? Why?”
“Because of your mother,” Dave said. “Because she sees her crying all the time about not having enough space, and now they all think you’re going crazy.”
I was stunned, speechless. I shifted my rear, making sure my shoulder didn’t touch Dave’s. “Why?”
“Well, you are, aren’t you? My mom says you’re not sleeping. She says you’re scared of things: fires, and walking home from school. Look how you acted in that oral report.”
Oral reports. Kidnapping and murder and assassinations and riots and oral reports. And now—“Quit messing with that bush!” I said. “You’re hurting it.”
He didn’t stop. “And I know you ditched those newspapers, Chérie. You didn’t fool me.”
Had he told Aunt Bonnie that?
“I’m not the only one who’s crazy,” I said. “Your brother belongs in the monkey house. Throwing things at little kids out car windows. And look what he did to Joanie.”
“Joanie had it coming,” Dave said, sounding like Pete.
I stood up and yelled, “She did not! If you think that, you’re as stupid as Pete is!”
“I call Chérie in the Rankins’ bushes with Day-ave!” yodeled Aimée across the night.
I crossed my arms over my stomach to hold my tears in and bent over the bush to say, “I used to think you were my brother. I hope you do leave. The sooner the better.” Now Dave was standing up, too. He stood staring at me, didn’t run off and hide. Aimée came running to me to tag us out, unable to see what was going on over here in the dark. Dave gripped my elf house by its branches and rocked it, rattled it, cracked it.
“Stop it!” I screeched. But he yanked it up out of the earth. It made a creaking, ripping sound. Then he threw it right at me, and the dirt from the roots showered down over my jeans and sneakers.
Aimée got to me just in time to see the elf house roll like a tumbleweed at my feet. She stared at it and at Dave and me. I waited for the explosion of tears and sobbing that both Dave and I knew would come. But Aimée’s eyes stayed wide like Aunt Bonnie’s, round and anxious.
“I don’t care what you think you’re doing,” she said angrily. “You’re It, Chérie, and don’t try to get out of it.”
Nobody else knew what had happened in Elfland. I was shaking and silent, the way I’d been when I’d dumped the newspapers, when I’d heard the news about Wendy Boland. I was hidden, colorless, my house uprooted, in the dark. I could have just gone home, ended the game, taken Joanie and Aimée with me. But then Dave would have won. So I climbed the deck steps to his back porch and leaned my wet face on my arms. “One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three …”
Aimée’s hand slipped into mine. She hadn’t run. She hadn’t cried or screamed or carried on. “Gosh, Aimée,” I said when I could speak, “you’ve outdone yourself.”
“I saw what he did,” she said.
“Em, he pulled up my whole elf house,” I sobbed.
“Are you all right, Cher?” she asked. “If Dave hurt you, I was going to run for Aunt Bonnie.”
I became aware of my body suddenly, and realized that I was more mad than hurt. The elf house branches had scratched my arms in a few places, that was all. I could still see the forsythia bush flying toward me, thudding into my stomach.
• • •
I drifted in and out of nightmares of Dave ahead of me on his bike, faltering, wobbling, plunging off the bridge into the empty blue air below, of myself floundering, wavering, plummeting down and down, arms and legs and pedals and handlebars falling.
I woke at last with a thud into a gray Sunday morning, feeling as if I’d ridden my bike a million miles across gray stones, a narrow wall that kept repeating beneath my tires.
The sky was gray and cloudy. The day after my birthday, with nothing to look forward to. The wind was whipping up the pine trees outside my window. I could see them bouncing from where I lay. My trees, I thought. Suddenly I remembered what Dave had said the night before about his house.
I sat up in bed and looked at it. Lemon yellow. I didn’t want to move there any more than I wanted to move into any other house. Then Uncle Joe came out of the house and got into
the black Volkswagen, as casually as if he were going out for cigarettes, and drove away. Someone was at the door, not waving: Aunt Bonnie and Pete and Dave. Uncle Joe didn’t toot the horn as usual. He didn’t wave, either.
I flopped down again on my back. God forbid that any of the Ascontis had seen me. But they hadn’t. They’d all been watching Uncle Joe. I wanted to go back to sleep, to hide my head all day. But there were newspapers, always newspapers. Sunday morning. And I didn’t want Dave coming over to do them for me, not today.
Faux Pas met me at the bottom of the stairs. I staggered past her into the kitchen. It was early, earlier than I needed to get up even for newspapers. Freddy was still asleep, that was how early. Aunt Bonnie was there in her red bathrobe, telling Mom and Dad that Uncle Joe was gone and wasn’t coming back.
“Alone?” I asked.
Aunt Bonnie nodded, gulping. “The boys are here, and I am here. He has gone his merry way.” She didn’t seem surprised. I guess no one was but me.
“Gone where?”
“Just gone.” I saw again Uncle Joe’s Volkswagen going down Marvin Road not half an hour ago. Had he been going then? How did Aunt Bonnie know he was gone for good?
What could have led Uncle Joe to disappear into thin air, along with his old black Volkswagen, a satchel of clothes, and, Aunt Bonnie reported, a big box of papers he called his novel? “Too bad he didn’t leave it,” Aunt Bonnie said. “It would have made a nice bonfire.”
“What about Faux Pas?” I asked.
What a stupid question. I wished I hadn’t said it as soon as I said it. It was this question that made Aunt Bonnie, dry-eyed and calm up to this point, slip into tears at last. “He could have taken the damned dog at least!” Not only was she swearing, but she was laughing and crying at the same time.
There was so much that I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know why Uncle Joe left, just when he was coming back.
“He wants to write a novel,” said Dad.
“He doesn’t want to teach anymore,” said Mom.
He wanted to go off on his own someplace where he wouldn’t have to hear Pete talk about going to war. It had been a long time since he and Aunt Bonnie had been really happy anyway. It wasn’t his kind of town, and it had been a terrible year, and it wasn’t his kind of world. That was what Mom and Dad said. It wasn’t news to them.
I turned away and went upstairs and wouldn’t come down when they called me back. I shut my door and didn’t open it again, and nobody came and made me.
After a few hours Dad knocked on the door. “Chérie? Get those newspapers where they belong. We’ve got to get moving. We’re all going out to Chubby Lanes for lunch.”
“What for?”
“Cher, some people are coming to look at the house.”
“So?”
“They’ve already seen it once and might be ready to make an offer.” This was Dad talking, not Mom, talking as though he wanted to sell our house.
I didn’t. I didn’t want people to make an offer. I didn’t want them to take a second look. I didn’t want to move out of my room, out of our house. “Forget it!” I yelled.
“I don’t have time for dramatics, Chérie,” Dad said. “Get a move on.”
I got a move on. There wasn’t anything else to do. Nobody cared what I wanted or didn’t want.
In the evening, when I was setting the table, the realtor called and said the people had made an offer. Mom and Dad accepted. Mom was on the kitchen phone, and Dad was on the bedroom phone. But they came together into the dining room to tell Aimée and me.
“Well, they offered, and we accepted,” said Mom.
Aimée turned and looked at me.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means,” said Dad, “that we’ll be moving into the Ascontis’ house just before Christmas.”
“Where are they going?” Aimée asked.
I sat down at the table and stared at the little stack of four paper napkins that were in my hands.
“Massachusetts,” I whispered to Aimée.
“That’s right,” Mom said, sounding surprised that I knew. I looked up long enough to glare at her. “Aunt Bonnie’s going to move back to her hometown with the boys.”
“And we get their house?” asked Aimée. She made it sound like a hand-me-down, which I guess it was, except that they hadn’t exactly outgrown it. They had gotten too small for it instead.
Mom plopped cross-legged on the floor beside me. She pulled my hands, and the napkins, out of my lap into her hands. “Chérie,” she said, “they’ll come back—a lot.” I looked into her face and saw tears coming down.
Dad sat heavily in a chair on the other side of the table. “We’re all trying to make the best of a bad situation, girls,” he said.
“None of us wants the Ascontis to leave,” Mom wailed. “But we thought you girls would like bigger rooms—and a family room, and a deck.” Home base.
“We’ll be in the circle.” Aimée was having a revelation. “And we’ll be back doors with Pammy!”
And Dave would be leaving. Mom saw that thought cross my face, I think. She gripped my hands harder. “They’ll always be our friends, Cher,” she said.
Aunt Bonnie would be leaving. “Oh, Ma,” I said.
Aimée asked, “Which room is going to be mine?”
I ran for my room, my nest of a room for a builder bird, even though all my building stuff was hidden away from the realtor. I didn’t come out.
CHAPTER 18
ON MONDAY I WENT TO SCHOOL. I just went. To hell with it. I didn’t care enough not to, not anymore. My head hurt, and my stomach hurt. I didn’t wait for Dave and Pete. I didn’t ride Reshna. I just walked to school without looking left or right or in front of me—least of all, behind me. I went to homeroom, and then I went to Spanish, and then I went to science. I sat up in the front of science class on Mr. Stone’s stool by the lab table, and stared out at the class and waited for them to stop talking so I could begin.
I was prepared this time. I had the whole thing on note cards, and I read it right out of my lap. Mr. Stone made Dave hold my diagram of the moon. I think that was so Dave would have to face the class and couldn’t mess with me. But I didn’t imagine Dave would be in the mood to mess with me.
For a moment I was surprised that Dave was even there, but what was he supposed to do, stay home and cry? He wasn’t acting the way I would have about it, the way I’d been acting all last week.
It didn’t stop Dave from making significant faces at Nathan and Ziggy. It didn’t stop him from asking them over to his house after school. And it didn’t stop them from coming out on Dave’s stoop after school to tease me about what I’d said.
Ziggy yelled, “Hey, Chérie, show me your heavenly body.”
I didn’t, as Aunt Bonnie would say, dignify his comment with a response. But Nathan yelled, “Come on, Asconti, show her yours!” Dave put his hand to the top of his pants and called, “Chérie, want to see my moon?” Anything to stay in with the boys.
“Sure, yours and your brother’s,” I said.
“Hey, Joanie Buczko wants to see his brother’s!” Nathan’s voice followed me up the steps.
“No, she wants to see yours!” Ziggy howled.
Why would Aunt Bonnie want all of them there today? Her car wasn’t even there, just a note on the door that Dave hadn’t bothered taking down. He probably hadn’t even read it. At least he would know she wasn’t gone for good, too. Or was she? I wouldn’t blame her, leaving the two of them behind. As soon as I thought that, I was sorry. She never would leave them behind. For Dave’s sake. Pete was old enough to take care of himself, and he was horrible anyway. But Dave? My friend Dave? My enemy Dave?
I grabbed the stack of papers off the porch and slammed them on the kitchen counter, began folding and banging them facedown.
“Quiet, Chérie!” came Mom’s voice from the dining room.
Aimée came into the kitchen and watched me. “What are you so mad
about?”
“Nothing!” I picked up the stack of papers and carried them to my bike baskets, parceled them out so there were equal amounts on each side. Aimée came out to the driveway. She stood over her bike and kicked at the training wheels.
“You’re mad,” she said. “I can tell.” She said it in the same tone that she’d say, “I’m going to tell,” as if she knew a bad secret about me.
“Em?” I said, suddenly understanding her. “Want to come with me?”
“Yeah.”
“Mom!” I yelled. “I’m taking Aimée.” I took off before she had time to stop me or tell me to quit yelling.
Aimée squeezed her feet into the baskets next to the papers, and her hands gripped my shirt just above my behind.
“Aimée?” I said over my shoulder. “I want you to watch me ride this bike. And I want you to listen.”
I told her about holding the handlebars steady, about keeping your head up, about pointing your toes frontward. I told her you didn’t have to worry about balancing or what the wheels were doing as long as you kept on pedaling and kept the handlebars straight. I showed her how to lean over on a curve. I made her watch me put my foot down when I stopped.
“When you think you’re prepared, Em, we’ll take off your training wheels.”
Behind me, she started to sniffle.
I stopped the bike. “When you feel ready, Em. It’s your call. Okay? Up to you.” I helped her blow her nose. We went home.
On Tuesday after school I didn’t go home on time, and I didn’t call to say I’d be late. I walked from school to Lou the barber and got my braids cut off. I figured Mom would have a coronary if I brought them home in a box like in the movies, so I left them on the barbershop floor and pretended it didn’t matter, tossing my incredibly light head.
I walked along looking at my reflection in the windows of the stores. I wasn’t sure it was me. But after a few windows I realized that I liked my new replacement head. My hair curled around my ears and felt feathery on my forehead. Cherry Square had the last windows downtown, and I took an extra-long look. I smiled at myself.
Mom cried, so then Aimée had to cry, too. But later, when I was going to bed, I opened the door to her room and went in to look in her big mirror. Aimée was in her bed reading Harriet the Spy. It was a pretty hard book for an eight-year-old, but Dave had given it to her, and she’d read anything if he said to. I stood and looked at my hair.
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